Is the play really the thing?
Theatres struggle with ways to attract crowds without selling their souls
STRATFORD, ONT. With generations of devoted playgoers getting older, production costs rising and entertainment competition ever stiffer, North America’s temples of Shakespeare are being compelled to think more creatively and assertively about the gateway theatre drug they push. And to accomplish it without muddying their mission and selling their souls.
At festivals and other classical theatres from coast to coast, companies are commissioning dramatists to write new plays to comment on Shakespeare; building more talks with actors, designers and scholars into schedules; opening roles and directing slots to more diverse artists; looking to more commercial fare to supplement their programming; and even developing signature foods that visitors want to come back for. The Utah Shakespeare Festival in Cedar City, for one, might tinker with the plays but it doesn’t mess with Puck’s Chocolates, a staple snack that the Salt Lake Tribune once called “the stuff of festival legend.”
“We have to do more than put on a play,” says Antoni Cimolino, artistic director of the theatre mecca’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ont., one of the most renowned in the English-speaking world. “We have to give people an entire experience.”
The question of how a big, aspirational classical theatre confronts a culture in which youth is held up as a golden ideal — and plays of old can be dismissed by large swaths of the population as boring — is a particularly burning one at the moment for another of the continent’s classical stalwarts, Washington, D.C.’S Shakespeare Theatre Company. With the retirement of founding artistic director, Michael Kahn, scheduled for the end of the 201819 season, the company is engaged in the first search for a leader in its 32-year history.
The Shakespeare Theatre Company has had a distinguished run in the nation’s capital, winning the Tony Award for best regional theatre in 2012. Strong attendance in its longtime downtown home, the 450-seat Lansburgh Theatre, led it, in 2007, to build a 775-seat theatre: the $89-million Sidney Harman Hall. It’s a handsome space, but its dimensions have proved vexing for many directors — and difficult to fill, both in terms of artistry and audiences. As a longtime theatre artist who has worked there multiple times puts it: “The space is too big. It’s a black hole. Once you create a space in which the actor can’t reach the audience, you take something away. And everything in the Harman is just trying to overcome this deficit.”
Even then, theatres are hardpressed to go beyond the old classical standbys. In the 2015-16 season, for example, a revival of the Cole Porter musical Kiss Me, Kate filled 70 per cent of the seats in the Harman, and a production of The Taming of the Shrew, on which it’s based, filled only 53 per cent.
This portends deeper contemplationatstcoverhowtoelectrify audiences with the work of its namesake playwright — and think more creatively about the other things a classical theatre might offer to stimulate greater interest.
“I think the hard part for us is the times are changing so rapidly, and wehavetoplanasmuchasayear ahead,” says Chris Jennings, the Shakespeare Theatre’s managing director. “People have to feel it’s both great theatre and connecting to their lives.”
One can sense a revolution in how to package Shakespeare is not only gradually gaining momentum but is also being viewed as essential. At Stratford, for instance, an ethos prevails of theatre as not simply a passive entertainment. More and more, it’s a conveyance for other social and intellectual activities on the sprawling festival campus.
It’s midmorning on a warm summer Saturday, and a little blackbox theatre on George Street with the steep rows of seats is practically filled with Shakespeare lovers. A shocking number have pads in their laps and are taking notes — as if this were a graduate-level seminar on the sonnets.
But no one here will have their knowledge tested on the soliloquies in Antony and Cleopatra or the references to flowers in Ophelia’s mad scene. The gathering is called the Forum, one of 150 such extra, non-performance meetups on Shakespeare and other theatre topics the Stratford Shakespeare Festival now provides each season for the thousands of visitors to this mid-sized Ontario town (pop. 31,000) on the Avon River.
Meanwhile, in New York’s Central Park this summer, the venerable Public Theater has brought to front and centre its Public Works initiative, a program mixing professional performers and non-professional actors from diverse neighbourhoods around the city. Ensconced at the moment at the Delacorte Theater — in a slot traditionally reserved for a purely professional production — director-composer Shaina Taub’s Public Works 90-minute Twelfth Night, an effervescent, highly entertaining version pulsating with comic energy and boasting one of the best original pop scores in town. Smaller companies, such as Washington’s Folger Theatre, have been innovating, too, by joining forces with edgier troupes, such as New York’s Fiasco Theatre and Bedlam company, experimenting with new ways of mounting classical works.
“There’s no such thing as a non-contemporary production of Shakespeare,” says Oskar Eustis, the Public’s artistic director. “It’s always in the moment. But it’s our job to make it alive in the moment.”
The Stratford Festival — which began with Alec Guinness as Richard III in July 1953 — has made a full-out commitment to innovation.
“We have to create events, based upon the uniqueness of a director’s vision,” Cimolino says. This summer, Prospero, the ruler of the magical isle in The Tempest, is played by Martha Henry; actors of various colours and genders portray the pairs of confused twins — usually male — in The Comedy of Errors; and the Coriolanus of director Robert Lepage’s spectacularly cinematic tragedy is played by a black actor. None of these choices in themselves is unique, but taken together, they are a statement by a leading institution about the classical field letting fresh imaginative air into its spaces.
The festival, which year in and out attracts about 470,000 playgoers from April to November, about 20 per cent of them from the United States, has stepped up efforts to fill the time for visitors away from its dozen shows in three venues (with a fourth being renovated and expanded).
“We’re trying to think more about young audiences. They want more context,” says Anita Gaffney, Stratford’s executive director. “They also want more engagement, and they want it before and after the performances.”
As a result, Stratford is developing new late-night offerings and producing some works that would certainly have been out of the range of the King ’s Men: This summer, it’s a revival of The Rocky Horror Show, a musical regular embellished with the requisite profane taunts from audiences.
Audiences that want Shakespeare in modern flavours will encounter playwrights hard at work trying to please them.
At the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Va., Shakespeare’s New Contemporaries is awarding $25,000 commissions for 38 works created as companion pieces to Shakespearean originals: The first are Anne Page Hates Fun, by Ann Witting, inspired by The Merry Wives of Windsor; and 16 Winters or the Bear’s Tale, Mary Elizabeth Hamilton’s response to The Winter’s Tale.
It is, it seems, the inexhaustible appetite to understand the plays by a man Eustis calls “the greatest writer in the English language” that these theatres are stretching to sate.
One of them, the New York Classical Theatre, travels each summer from one New York City park to another, providing a free and casual experience that hooks people who ordinarily could not afford a ticket to one of the festivals: About 30 per cent of its audience, says founding artistic director Stephen Burdman, live below the poverty line.
On a July weekday evening, a crowd of 100 or so gathered by Castle Clinton in Battery Park for its production of Romeo and Juliet. Parents parked their babies next to them in strollers and older folk set their walkers against trees.
As twilight enveloped the park, company acolytes pulled out flashlights — Romeo and Juliet’s lighting design. It was a wonderful way to see how a company can claim Shakespeare for new audiences and rekindle it for the more familiar, one beguiled city dweller at a time.